The XkbOptions line is probably not needed. Orignially, I was using it to toggle the keyboard settingsby pressing shift and alt simultaneously. Now it seems to switch between needing to use the functionkey to access special characters or always having them on.

In any event, I got the äåé®þüúíóö that I wanted.

Update:

Having us_intl as the default keyboard can be a nuisance when typing a lot of English text. I solved the problem by switching from us_regular and us_international as follows: